Monday, May 28, 2018

Marc Faber says the U.S. Dollar’s strength will not last long. “The last thing the U.S. administration wants today is to have a strong Dollar.”

Right now, investors are geared towards equities and cryptocurrencies. However, Faber expects within a few years investors will turn towards gold and silver. Faber does not have faith in most cryptocurrencies.

While he says blockchain technology is here to stay, he thinks the vast majority of cryptocurrencies will fail.

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

In this wide ranging interview, Jason asks Marc about asset price volatility, whether the stock market is topping, central bank balance sheets and whether they can be meaningfully reduced, the credit bubble in China, the US vs China trade war, and the popularity of crypto currencies in Asia.

Thursday, May 17, 2018

With global markets struggling for direction after a rocky start to the year, Dr Doom has been conspicuously absent from the conversation. Investment adviser Marc Faber, 72, who adopted the nickname in 1987 after a newspaper column highlighted his contrarian outlook on markets, has had a quiet six months.

Faber – a once regular guest on business news shows such as CNBC’s Squawk Box and Bloomberg Television – has faded from view since the publication of his October newsletter The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report for comments that were condemned as racist. This included a passage where Faber used offensive racial references in laying out a bleak picture for the US if its early immigration flows had been from Africa rather than Europe. He has since been dropped from the booking lists for programmes at Fox News and CNBC, according to Reuters.

At the time, Faber told Canada’s Global & Mail he stood by the remarks, saying in an email exchange that he did not regret writing the passage and that he had a free right to express his views.

When This Week in Asia spoke to Faber at his suite at the Grand Hyatt in Hong Kong this year, he sounded resigned to the loss of his appearances on business television.

“Everything in life and the universe has a timeline, it is transient. In other words, what you have today, you may not have tomorrow,” Faber said.

Known for a keen interest in history, and the works of innovators such as Russian “wave theory” economist Nikolai Kondratiev, Faber has slipped from the public spotlight just as global markets have entered a period of heightened volatility...

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

The tariffs are going to backfire on the US very badly because you have to understand that the US was economically very powerful until the early 1980s. The same was the time in the 70s and early 80s. If America sneezes, Asia catches the cold because all the exports went to America. But this is no longer the case nowadays. Take steel. 2% of US steel imports are from China and only 1.5% of Chinese production of steel is exported to the US.

Even if the US would not buy any steel at all from China, it would not matter to the Chinese. At the time of Davos in February, a Chinese owner of the world’s largest bus company was interviewed and they asked him about US tariffs and chances of trade war with US. He said we really do not care. We export our buses to 150 different countries in the world, what do we care about the American market and that is true for many companies. The American market is no longer that relevant. China exports more to commodity producers than to the US and the same applies to the South Korea.

What has changed in the last 30-40 years is that whereas Asia and the world was American centric before, the world has become much more China centric in Asia and it is a much more multi-dimensional global economy where the US has lost a lot of its importance, relatively speaking. It has also lost the lot of prestige because of their failed interventions in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, in Afghanistan, everything they touched, they messed up.

Wednesday, May 2, 2018

In terms of interest rates, historically, our standards have been at the lowest level in the history of mankind from say 3000 BC up to now. So, in 5,000 years of history, we have never been this low. In the US, the low for the 10 years treasury was at 1.37% in July 2016 and in Europe, in many cases, there have been negative interest rates.

Recently, that has moved up a little bit but in Switzerland and in Japan, basically we still have negative interest rates and we have had them essentially for the last eight-nine years. This is a very unusual situation. I do not think anyone could expect interest rate to stay this low for much further. There is a rising tendency but recently the treasury bonds in the US have sold off quite considerably and I believe that we could have one more decline in interest rates as a result of a recession that may happen later on this year or next year. So, I actually went long on some treasury bonds in the US.

Concerning global trade, you are right. The idea was that multinationals in Europe and especially in the US could open up new markets like China and then sell their goods into these markets. But conditions have somewhat changed in the sense that it is the Chinese and other emerging economies that sold their goods into the US.

So to some extent, it backfired on the US and as you know the US is not the fair player and they reacted negatively. These trade sanctions or trade barriers, in my view are not very negative for China and other countries. Rather they are very negative for the US. This is my assessment of the situation.